Why drinking alcohol leads to more drinking: the brain changes discovered by US researchers
- Changes in the brain that occur after drinking can make people want to drink more when they’re in certain places or with certain people, study reveals
- Findings could lead to drugs being made to treat addiction that target specific areas of the brain that alcohol affects
Running into a former drinking buddy or passing a once-favourite bar can cause recovering alcoholics to relapse.
But the biology behind why those setbacks happen was a mystery to scientists until recently, when researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the US found that alcohol directly affects the brain’s learning and memory system through a test on mice.
Drinking actually helps people’s brains “learn” alcohol – the bar they’re drinking in, the street they’re on and the people they’re with – says Shelley Berger, a cell and developmental biology professor who is the study’s senior author. This learning can make people want to drink more when they’re in certain environments or with groups of people.
And unravelling how the learning happens opens the possibility someday of treatments to block the action.
In the new study, published recently in the journal Nature, researchers found that when alcohol is consumed and goes to the liver it is processed into acetate, a by-product. Acetate then travels to the brain, where it turns certain genes on and off in a cell by attaching to histones, the proteins that package DNA in a cell’s nucleus, Berger says.
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“DNA is about two feet long in every cell and it’s all folded up into the nucleus,” she says. “There’s a packaging material that organises it in a really orderly way, and it turns the right genes on and off through these little chemical groups. Acetate is one of those chemical groups.”
It turns out that the enzyme responsible for depositing acetate into cells, called ACSS2, activates key memory genes important for learning.
To test this, researchers exposed mice to two differently patterned chambers – one containing alcohol and one without. After a “learning period,” the mice were allowed to roam freely between the two. They preferred the chamber that was paired with alcohol. But after lowering the levels of ACSS2 in the mice’s brains, researchers found that they spent an equal amount of time in both chambers.
Researchers also found that when a pregnant mouse consumed alcohol, acetate was delivered through the placenta and into the fetus’ developing brain. This finding could lead to better understanding of fetal alcohol syndrome, Berger says.
Berger adds that this was the first empirical evidence showing that alcohol consumption affects how genes are expressed in the brain. She is now interested in using the information to make a drug that could be used to stop people from “learning” alcohol.
“When we learn something, there’s a process called reconsolidation,” Berger says. “That’s when something is really solidified, and we feel that we really understand it now. We want to disrupt that, after someone has been exposed to alcohol but before they reconsolidate the information.”
What this tells us is that acetate may be a very good thing for memory, but a lot might not be good
Henry Kranzler, director of Penn’s Centre for Studies on Addiction, says Berger’s research is “intriguing” because it offers the potential of “filling in a missing piece in our understanding of the development and maintenance of heavy drinking”.
“Her research is consistent with the idea that addiction is a learned process,” he says. “It opens up the potential to identify specific targets in the brain to be modified therapeutically with medications and perhaps also genetically, at some point.”
In other words, researchers can make drugs to treat addiction that target specific areas of the brain that alcohol affects.
The next step, however, is to conduct more research using animals before eventually moving on to humans.
“This is a really exciting, unexpected finding, that alcohol consumed would end up in the brain,” Berger says. “What this tells us is that acetate may be a very good thing for memory, but a lot might not be good, especially if you’re getting it in the context of something that’s not good for you.”
